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A giant column of dark smoke rises more than 20,000 feet into the air after the atomic bomb exploded over the Japanese port of Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945. Left, a 1948 photo of Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the Army's head of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs and the first chief of a secret project to develop radioactive weapons to assassinate "important individuals" during the Cold War.